Virginia Tech

ESM4714

Scientific Visualization Analysis and Multimedia

Principal Investigator:
Dheva Raja draja@vt.edu

Title:

NIST's Smokeview: A Fire Simulation Program--Porting from the Desktop to the CAVE

Background:

Smokeview is a program that predicts fire and smoke propagation throughout a building given a set of parameters. These parameters range from the actual dimensions of the building structure to the dimensions of window and door openings. Additionally, input parameters that may be set include the type of materials that the structure is comprised of, whether the building has a sprinkler and/or ventilation system,and of course the area in which the initial combustion took place. Smokeview, which is the graphical interface to the fire simulation data generation program FDS, was written by Glenn Forney, a physicist at NIST.

Smokeview is written in low-level OpenGL code, and was designed to run on desktop computers with multiple operating systems including Windows, Unix(SGI), and Linux. The CAVE is an immersive environment that would provide an interesting perspective when running Smokeview. DIVERSE is the API being used to port Smokeview, and more specifically DGL, which is the OpenGL interface to DIVERSE.

Objectives:

--Port Smokeview from the desktop to the CAVE

--Create website detailing work, intermediate steps, downloadable files, and final results

--Create website of a simple users guide to DGL, with some elementary examples of DGL code in action

Tools:

-- DIVERSE This is an application programminginterface (API) which allows virtual environments and visualisation applications to scale fromdesktop workstations to the CAVE and other high-end visualisation computers without significant code changes. DGL is a subset of, and the OpenGL interface to DIVERSE and will be used for this work.

-- All of the intersting hardware at our disposal in the graphics and visualisation lab.

Last updated 15.03.2003 13.20